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Tuesday, March 22, 2016

I have never been fond of GATE exam. In fact, this is a terrible exam and I have written about it several times on this blog. So often one finds ambiguous questions. This blog is to report one such ambiguous question in GATE 2016 Computer Science and Engineering paper.

Q. Which one of the following protocols is NOT used to resolve one form of address to another one?

(A) DNS
(B) ARP
(C) DHCP
(D) RARP

The official answer is (C).

Obviously, the question was set by someone who does not understand protocols. They would have checked some book which would have said that Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is used to dynamically assign IP addresses to hosts. They would have assumed that DHCP can only do this, and nothing else. In particular, they would have assumed that DHCP is NOT used to resolve one form of address to another one. But, of course, DHCP can very much be used to provide static addresses by using MAC address as one possible identity of the node seeking an IP address.

So far, so good. I guess that the committee that sets up a question paper can not be a very large committee in the interest of secrecy. And hence one cannot possibly have an expert from each sub-discipline of Computer Science. And therefore, such misunderstandings can happen. And this is really the cause of ambiguous questions in GATE, for which there is no easy solution.

I was hoping that at least after such an ambiguity has crept in, and they have been informed about it, they will take appropriate measures to reduce the impact of such an error on students. But, unfortunately, at least in this case, they decided to ignore the appeal, which is very strange to me.